Speaking of the future, 3D television and the far far future… September 14, 2013

Meanwhile in the present what of this news, that the BBC is suspending production of 3-D programmes indefinitely. So I guess that’s it until the holotanks arrive.

And speaking of the future…

The thought struck me that since plate tectonics is a continual process what is the situation in relation to the shape of the continents, and indeed Ireland in the future. Well, let’s just say that 100 million years from now, should humanity continue to exist in any shape or form, there would appear to be some intriguing problems they will be facing. Though note that in this projection Ireland and Britain remain distinct from each other… Sinn Féin, or so it would seem.

The human lineage diverged from the last common ancestor with its closest living relative, the chimpanzee, some five million years ago, evolving into the australopithecines and eventually the genus Homo.[4] The first Homo species to move out of Africa was Homo erectus, the African variety of which, together with Homo heidelbergensis, is considered to be the immediate ancestor of modern humans.[5][6] Homo sapiens originated in Africa, where it reached anatomical modernity about 200,000 years ago and began to exhibit full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago.[7] Homo sapiens proceeded to colonize the continents, arriving in Eurasia 125,000–60,000 years ago,[8][9] Australia around 40,000 years ago, the Americas around 15,000 years ago, and remote islands such as Hawaii, Easter Island, Madagascar, and New Zealand between the years AD 300 and 1280.[10][11]

So we’ve been around, as humans, in behavioral terms, a mere 50,000 years? And the map above covers 100 million years? Blink of an eye.

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I’d have liked to have seen some intervening shots between now and 100m years CE – we see a lot of shallow seas where there was land, and a practically no ice-caps – does the model show an end to glaciation cycles after the sudden release of atmospheric carbon that we have engineered?

But as you point out – the time scale is not exactly human – so what it ‘means’ for whatever we will or not be, is moot.

I was wondering about glaciation, or rising sea levels. Or are they simply too transitory that they don’t wind up impacting hugely on this model.

I often wonder if our lack of appreciation of time, and how deep it is, in terms of how far it stretches back and forward, impacts upon us as a species. The oldest continuous institution on the planet may be kind of sort of the Catholic Church, and that’s what, 2,000 years old or so. The Althing parliament in Iceland doesn’t do badly in those terms, but that was established in the 900s. But they’re literally nothing in geological time. And I suspect that generally we’re very impatient. Look at how spaceflight has been constrained to low earth orbit for decades. Or how the impact of climate change is waved away. I think this is deeply problematic, not so much on the scales in the video, as you say that’s rendered moot by its sheer scope, but in terms of short to medium term problems or challenges for us as a species in realistic projections of time, say 10 years to 500, or longer in relation to long lasting planetary impacts from human activity.

‘Time seems to us a queer thing [……] It is not new facts about time we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us. But it is the use of the substantive “time” that mystifies us. If we look into the grammar of that word, we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a deity of negation or disjunction’ – Wittgenstein, the Blue Book

I always think time is uncanny in the German sense of the word ‘unheimlich’, which paradoxically in the literal translation means the opposite of what is familiar, when of course time is deeply familiar, yet very very strange.